I was playing Minecraft 1.6.2 survival mode (normal difficulty), and I built a house. Then I went far away to explore a cave. When I got back, part of my house had simply disappeared.
As you can see, a part of my house just vanished. There used to be walls and a roof, but not anymore.
The stranger thing is, the wooden floor just turned into a perfect square of dirt.
There also used to be a pond nearby, but part of the pond also turned into dirt. (as indicated by the redstone circuit.)
Fences are gone. My iron golem and a cat are nowhere to be found.
The whole area encircled by the redstone simply turn into dirt.
I thought of a creeper explosion. Yes, I might have left the gate open, and yes a creeper might be able to sneak into the house, (if it managed to get pass my two cats).
It seems unlikely that an explosion would occur. There is no hole on the ground, and the roof is gone too. I don't think the blast radius is that large. The house was fine when I left. Doesn't a creeper has to be near me to trigger an explosion?
I am really puzzled. Can somebody explain what happened? I would be very grateful.
Best Answer
It most certainly was no creeper, creepers don't place dirt back.
It looks like chunk got reset. The minecraft world is infinite, but is internally stored in 16x16 "chunks" of land. The chunks you explored are saved to a file (so the more land you explore, the bigger your save file becomes), if this file gets lost, the game will regenerate the area and basically "reset" the land back to what it was before any player made modifications and without any items/entities(your cat and golem are entities). Another way a chunk could get reset is if a bug caused the game to think "this chunk doesn't exist yet", and then the game will regenerate the area.
The area that got reset in your case is a 16x16 block area (or a multiple of that, can't see if there are any other strange borders further out to the top of your picture).
If you had any mining shaft running through that area, they'll be refilled with stone too. The good part is that ores are replaced too! So if you remember finding diamonds right under that piece of land, they'll be replaced too!